British Poetry in the Age of Modernism

Beginning of article

Peter Howarth. British Poetry in the Age of Modernism. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge UP, 2005. $80.00

Peter Howarth's British Poetry in the Age of Modernism begins with an historical trajectory, asserting that the apparent dichotomy of British poetry today has its roots in the early twentieth century, a time when poetic culture was less dichotomized than it would become. In Howarth's view, the dichotomies that followed after the war were based more on justifications for particular poetic practices than on the practices themselves. Howarth argues that the intellectual grounding for what would become a split lies in romanticism, particularly Coleridgean aesthetics. Noting that the …